Tag: hotels

Be careful of virtual payments at hotels

Rakesh Agrawal

Digital payments have no doubt had a positive effect. We can transact online and that gets easier and easier. Fraud is continually reduced. Companies like Stripe, Square and Shopify make it easy for small businesses to get online quickly. I was able to set up a shop on Shopify in about 30 minutes.

But with that convenience comes a challenge when you’re traveling.

Online travel agencies like Expedia, Priceline and others often take money upfront from customers by credit card. At check in, the customer is asked to provide a card for “incidentals.”

The problem is that sometimes the card gets charged for the room rate, something the customer has already paid.

The way hotels get paid by OTAs is through virtual cards. With a reservation, they also receive a virtual card to charge the wholesale rate. Hotel systems are designed to split bills. When it works correctly, the room rate is billed to the OTA’s virtual card and incidentals are billed to the card the customer provided at check in.

When it doesn’t work, the customer’s card is also charged the wholesale rate. I had this happen to me at Emeline in Charleston, S.C. I was charged an extra $386.10. It took many phone calls among hotels and with American Express to resolve this.

Unfortunately, there is little that travelers can do to avoid this. The best you can do is check your credit card bills for an extra charge and then complain. Most people at the hotel won’t know what’s you’re talking about. It is an easier conversation if you ask the hotel “did you charge me instead of the virtual card?”

redesign | travel: How would you improve this St. Regis hotel bath collection?

Rakesh Agrawal

The big issue here is that all three bottles look alike. There is shampoo, conditioner and body wash. But it’s not easy to tell which is which without picking up the small, likely wet bottles.

That’s bad enough for the typical person. But for people like me, who are blind as a bat, it is a serious issue. Without my glasses or contacts — the standard when I’m taking a shower — I couldn’t read the text until the bottle was within 5″ of my eyes.

Unfortunately, this is the status quo at hotels. They all have tiny bottles that are impossible to read. Some hotels have their amenities in clear plastic bottles, which makes it easier to distinguish the blue shampoo from the white conditioner. But you still have to figure out which is which.

My ideal solution has two parts:

  • Large letters on each bottle. S = Shampoo, B = Body wash, C= Conditioner.
  • Different shaped bottles. For example, circle for shampoo, square for conditioner, triangle for the body wash.

Changing the labels is relatively easy. Changing the shape of the bottles is more complicated.

Because chains use standardized toiletries, learning one would help you at multiple hotels. (On the flip side, it makes the roll out process longer.)

This isn’t just a usability issue; it could be an issue under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This quiz was so easy that a lot of people got the correct answer:

https://twitter.com/tim_poor/status/560108962696425472

Which is why it’s odd that hoteliers don’t seem to see the problem.

But at least St. Regis hotels have a sense of humor. They responded to my question: